Leo's lungs were twin bags of ground glass.
He bent over, hands on his knees, spit stringing from his lips to the pristine turf of the school field. The air he dragged in was cold and did nothing to soothe the fire in his chest.
It wasn't a drill. It was a hypothesis test, and he was the expendable variable.
Across the center circle, Coach Arkady stood with his arms crossed, a scientist observing a petri dish. To his left, a bored-looking Diaz leaned against a goalpost, scrolling through his phone. To his right, King Vance watched with the placid interest of a collector examining a common beetle.
"Again," Arkady said, his voice devoid of inflection.
This was the "New Order" training. No more Chaos Committees. No reassuring grins from Max.
For the last forty minutes, Leo had been a living tackling dummy in a drill Arkady called "Pale Horse."
The rules were simple, cruel, and revealing:
1. Leo, the "Prospect," started with the ball at the halfway line.
2. King, the "Terminator," started ten yards behind him.
3. Diaz, the "Wall," stood in goal.
4. Leo had to score. King's only objective was to stop him by any legal means.
5. If King stole the ball, the drill reset. If Leo shot and missed or saved, the drill reset.
6. They would do this until Arkady saw what he needed to see.
It was a test of Leo's composure under the direct, predatory pressure of a superior athlete. It was a test of King's defensive ruthlessness. It was a show for Diaz.
Iteration 17.
Leo wiped his mouth with jersey, stood up, and adjusted his father's glasses. The world snapped into focus, the system painting its usual tactical grid.
But the primary threat was no longer a glowing outline. It was a blond, ice-eyed reality named King Vance, who was currently stretching his calves with an indifference that was more insulting than any trash talk.
The ball sat at his feet. Arkady nodded.
Leo turned and ran.
He didn't try to dribble. He knew that was suicide. He took two touches, pushing the ball well ahead, and just sprinted, pouring every ounce of his AGI 8.6 into a desperate, straight-line burn toward the penalty area.
He didn't need to look back. He could feel King coming. Not the sound of footsteps, but a drop in pressure, a chilling of the air at his back.
The system gave a frantic, useless warning: [CLOSING VELOCITY: CRITICAL. INTERCEPTION IN 1.2 SECONDS.]
Twenty-five yards out. Leo pulled his foot back for a wild, hopeful punt. It was his only chance.
A foot slipped between his legs and hooked the ball away. Leo's momentum carried him forward, stumbling, while King nonchalantly stopped the ball dead, turned, and passed it gently back to the midfield spot.
No effort. No sweat.
"Your decision-making is pedestrian," Arkady noted, making a mark on his clipboard. "You see the net, not the goalkeeper. You run in a straight line. A pale horse of predictable intent. Again."
Iteration 23.
This time, Leo tried chaos. He feinted left, cut right, tried a stop-start.
King didn't bite. He simply matched him step-for-step, a mirror with superior reflexes, and shouldered him off the ball with a casual nudge that felt like being hit by a car door.
"Strength deficit: catastrophic," Arkady intoned. "You are a thought without a body to enact it. Again."
Leo pushed himself up, his shoulder throbbing. Humiliation was a hot coal in his gut. He was a lab rat, and King was the irresistible trap.
He glanced at the sideline. Max and Thomas were there now, having finished their own drills. They watched, their faces grim. No jokes. No cheers.
They saw the future of the striker hierarchy being written in real-time, and Leo was being erased.
Iteration 31.
Leo was a ghost of himself, moving on memory and spite. His vision swam. The G.O.A.L. System's prompts were bleary, lagging behind reality.
He received the ball. Instead of turning, he did something insane. He back-heeled it blindly, hoping to nutmeg King on pure luck.
It rolled pathetically to the side.
King didn't even retrieve it. He just looked at Arkady, one eyebrow raised.
"The software is glitching," King said, his voice cool. "Maybe he needs a reboot."
Diaz snorted a laugh from his goal.
That was the moment. The word. Software. It was a casual insult, but it struck Leo like a physical blow. It was too close to the truth. Was that all he was? A buggy program in a fragile frame?
A cold, clear fury cut through the fatigue. It wasn't hot anger. It was something deeper, quieter, and more dangerous.
He didn't look at King. He looked at the ball. He looked at Diaz, lounging in the goal. He looked at the net.
For the first time, he didn't see the system's grid. He saw a equation of humiliation. And he decided to solve it with a variable they hadn't accounted for: absolute, pointless risk.
Iteration 32.
Arkady nodded. Leo turned.
He didn't sprint. He walked. Three slow, deliberate steps with the ball at his feet.
King, puzzled for a half-second, closed in. This was new. The prey had stopped running.
At the exact moment King committed to a tackle, Leo did it. The move he'd practiced until his feet ached in his bedroom. The move from the CDs.
He rolled the ball onto the top of his right boot, flicked it up into the air—not high, just a foot off the ground—and as King's leg swept through the space where the ball had been.
Leo jumped, twisted in mid-air, and met the falling ball with a full, swinging bicycle kick.
It wasn't aimed at the goal. It was aimed from thirty-five yards out.
The contact was a muffled thump. The ball took off, a knuckling, wobbling missile that seemed to disobey physics. It dipped, swerved, and screamed toward the top corner.
Diaz, sprung from his lounging pose, exploded into a dive. It was a spectacular, athletic effort.
He was a full second too late.
BOOM.
The ball hit the back of the net with a sound like a gunshot, rippling the mesh violently.
Silence.
Absolute, stunned silence.
Leo lay on his back on the turf, the world spinning, every muscle screaming. He had nothing left. He'd spent his last coin on a single, absurd act of defiance.
He heard a low whistle. It was Diaz, picking himself up from the grass, a grudging smile on his face. "Okay. That was not software."
Arkady stared. He looked from the net to Leo, to King, who was standing frozen, his cool facade cracked for the first time, revealing pure, unadulterated shock.
The coach didn't smile. But he slowly, deliberately, drew a huge, circling star on his clipboard next to Leo's name.
He looked at Leo, then at King, his icy eyes glinting.
"The pale horse of predictable intent," Arkady repeated, his voice now carrying a strange, approving chill. "It seems this one has learned to change color."
He pointed to King. "You just got scored on from thirty-five yards by a bicycle kick. Let that calibrate your ego." He then turned his gaze to the gasping, broken form of Leo on the grass.
"Reed. You are inefficient, weak, and predictable… until you are not. That is your only currency. Do not spend it foolishly again. Get up. The real training begins now."
As Leo forced himself to his hands and knees, he saw King's expression. The shock was gone, burned away. What remained was a look of cold, crystalline recognition. The beetle had just stung the collector.
The New Order was still in place. But the hierarchy was no longer a simple equation. Leo had just introduced a radical, chaotic new integer: the capacity for the impossible.
He had survived the Pale Horse. Now, he had to learn to ride it.
Leo stumbled to the sideline, his legs trembling. He gulped water, the world a buzzing blur. He didn't see Frank step up for his turn. He only heard the distant thud of the ball, Arkady's clipped commands, and the final, definitive pronouncement that sealed his fate.
Frank was given the ball. King has less energy but his stamina was astonishing. Leo could bet that King's vitality was twice his.
After restarting ten times, Frank sinked in a good shot. It wasn't as acrobatic as Leo's but he didn't need as much time as Leo wasted.
Arkady simply wrote on his clipboard and looked up to the sweating strikers. "King is centre forward. Max and Thomas are left and right wingers. Frank, you're in the midfield. Reed," he said, his gaze finally landing on Leo.
"Reed is the sub striker. You cover all three forward positions. Do not let your one trick make you complacent."
Max and Thomas shook hands. Frank felt a cool wave of relief, he wasn't a striker but he's still in.
For Leo, it was like his perfect jigsaw puzzle just got broken. He quietly slipped into the locker room, his little fortitude keeping him from slumping.
The library was Leo's domain for the rest of the day. He received a notification and pulled his phone out. It was message sent to the team's Let's Chat forum.
MONDAY: English Final (2h) + Math Final (2h)
TUESDAY: Science Finals (Physics 2h, Chem/Bio 1h each)
WEDNESDAY: History (2h) + Sociology (1.5h)
THURSDAY: Geography (2h) + Language (1.5h)
FRIDAY: Art Practical/Theory (2h) + Catch-up/Make-ups
NB: All players automatically pass P.E. For those taking A.P exam, kindly see the Principal.
Leo groaned for years before dipping the phone back in his pocket.
A sigh escaped his lungs as he continued solving trigonometric functions. But Arkady's words kept dancing in his head.
"Reed is the sub striker." "Reed is the sub striker." "Reed is the sub striker."
They echoed with every scratch of his pen. His vision blurred, the trigonometric functions morphing into tactical diagrams of a bench.
A hot, helpless fury rose in his throat. He slammed his fist down on the open textbook, the sound a sharp CRACK in the silent room.
The librarian's furious "SHHH!" felt like the final lock clicking shut on a cage.
Leo gently packed his books in his bag and left the school promises. Arkady's words followed him home, a cheap, tinny echo stuck in his head: "Reed is the sub striker."
It wasn't a role. It was a brand. One he wanted to prevent.